Leica Tour: Inside a Camera Company at a Crossroads

Rudi Spiller, CEO of Germany’s Leica Camera AG, has a square jaw and stands as though rooted to the floor. His hair is closely cropped, and behind his rimless glasses his eyes are keen.

In opening remarks at a recent press conference trumpeting three new Leica products, Spiller described the company’s latest triumphs with the confidence of a supervillain proclaiming world domination. After greeting the inhabitants of planet Earth with salutations in a dozen languages, he waxed poetic about Leica’s commitment to excellence, and included a simple summation: “Our precision. Is. Perfect.”

The Leica M9, which debuted that day last month, is the latest in a line of rangefinder cameras that stretches back half a century. “This camera became an instant classic in 1954, and is now perfectly designed,” says Spiller, causing listeners to wonder whether the world will ever need an M10.

It has been three years since the much-heralded release of the M8, the previous model in Leica’s M series, which was the first digital in the line (the M8.2, and updated version, arrived last year). Wired.com visited the Leica factory in Solms, Germany, just before the M9 was released, and looked behind the scenes to see how Leica builds its renowned cameras. Here’s a glimpse of the historic company, with photos of its meticulous manufacturing process and the looming digital crossroads that will determine its future.

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Above: Here’s a Leica M8 in an early stage of assembly. Many of the mechanical parts are in place, but the viewfinder, lenses and electronic components have not been added.

The Leica camera manufacturing facility is located in Solms, Germany. Many of the employees who build Leicas have been with the company for decades. Stefan Daniels, who currently heads the Solms facility and helped direct the development of the M9, started with Leica at age 15, and earned a technical degree through his work at the company.

No photograph is a true copy of its subject, or even of the image that strikes the camera’s lens. But philosophical objections don’t stop photographers from pursuing the ideal image, which requires craft. The right tool can make all the difference.

For generations of photojournalists working in the middle of the action, a Leica camera was that tool. Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara; the naked, wailing Vietnamese girl photographed by Nick Ut as she fled a napalm attack; the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day in Times Square in 1945 by Alfred Eisenstaedt — all were snapped with Leicas. In fact, the company can honestly claim to have made such photographs possible in the first place. The cameras were compact, unobtrusive, reliable in the face of daily punishment and able to capture lifelike pictures without a second’s preparation.

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Above: Technicians insert the CCD, the camera’s image sensor, into the M8 body. The CCD is made to Leica’s specifications by Kodak. Its surface is covered in tiny microlenses designed to shift incoming light rays so that they strike the sensor evenly, with one microlens in front of every pixel. Each lens is roughly the thickness of a human hair.

Once the CCD is inserted, workers assemble the camera’s lightweight magnesium chassis, attaching the front to the back and securing top and bottom plates of heavy brass, designed to protect the delicate internal components.

The electronic components have now been installed and this Leica M8 can function at a basic level, allowing technicians to begin the extensive testing that Leica performs on each individual camera. By the time it is completed, a Leica M8 will have roughly 1,800 individual parts.

At the turn of the 20th century, engineer and amateur photographer Oskar Barnack was working for Leitz, a maker of optical instruments based in Wetzlar, Germany. Barnack enjoyed exploring the mountains nearby, but to document the vistas one had to lug a box camera and its permanent sidekick, a heavy satchel of glass plates. He designed a pocket-sized device that used modified movie film — the result was the world’s first 35-millimeter still camera.

Barnack’s employers dubbed the new product “Leica,” short for “Leitz camera.” The initial model, now known as the Ur-Leica, went into mass production in 1925, and the Leica legend seems to have rolled off the assembly line along with it. As early as 1928, Aleksandr Rodchenko, a master of Soviet propaganda, and André Kertész, the father of the photo essay, both owned Leicas. Other giants of the field followed, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work with a Leica popularized street photography and the impromptu style of postwar photojournalism.

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Above: Leica technicians put every camera through a series of rigorous tests, checking each of the camera’s systems, including shutter timing, range finder and focusing-system accuracy, as well as the sensitivity and consistency of the CCD.

In this stage of quality control, a technician determines the accuracy of the camera’s viewfinder. Every viewfinder has to be adjusted after installation, and Leica requires that the focus of an image seen through the viewfinder be no more than 0.0001 millimeters different than the image captured through the camera’s lens.

A workbench is set up to assemble analog cameras in the Leica assembly room. The M8 and M9 are built in parallel with analog cameras using similar techniques — the entire process includes roughly 35 people and takes about eight hours per camera.

A tiny dust particle in the interior of the camera can cause major problems, so the Leica factory has some of the features of a clean room. Employees wear low-static shoes to avoid tracking dust, and dust-absorbing floor mats are placed at the entrances to the assembly area. All paper products on the assembly line are covered in plastic to make certain that even the small fibers that might break away from the pages can’t escape into the air. And employees wear the inevitable hairnets.

The Leica’s small size and quiet shutter allowed Cartier-Bresson and his contemporaries to take photographs in public while on the move and without calling attention to themselves. In addition to allowing mobility, the Leica also boasted lenses of enviable quality, befitting a company with a deep knowledge of optics. The combination of accuracy and portability opened the door to a new realism, or as Cartier-Bresson put it, the Leica “literally constitutes the optical extension of my eye.”

Cartier-Bresson’s sentiments have been echoed by photographers ever since, as Leica has continued to produce cameras descended from the Ur-Leica design.

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Above: Boxes of M7 parts are ready to be assembled at the Leica factory.

According to Christian Erhardt, Leica’s vice president of marketing, one reason Leica’s technicians take such care in the manufacturing process is that almost all of them are avid users of the company’s products. “Many of our employees, either they are photographers by trade or have studied photography,” says Erhardt. “I would say pretty much everyone has photography as a hobby. It’s something that is kind of in your blood when you work for Leica.

A custom-made Leica M7 is covered with ostrich leather. Leica’s “a la carte” program allows the consumer to choose the camera’s cosmetic details, such as the color of the finish, buttons and leather case. Customers can also configure the viewfinder’s magnification and the location of its bright lines (that little box that frames the image you see when you look through the viewfinder).

A technician makes minor adjustments to the camera’s rangefinder to ensure that it is in sync with the camera’s lens.

Much of the fine-tuning of Leica cameras is done with the human eye rather than computers or complicated optical instruments. Here a technician checks and adjusts the rangefinder’s focusing mechanism manually using a pattern of framelines. None of the M-series cameras has autofocus, and Leica prides itself on building manual-focusing technology that’s accurate and easy to use.

Leica’s M-series rangefinder cameras (launched in 1954 with the M3) have a special place in the hearts of many famous photographers. Jim Marshall used Leica M-series cameras to capture Jimi Hendrix torching a guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival and the Beatles taking the stage for their last concert.

“I have been using Leica exclusively for 50 years,” Marshall says, “From a technical standpoint, the sharpness of the lenses, they are so much better than anything else.”

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Above: The guts of a pre-production Leica S2 camera sit on an engineer’s table at the Leica factory. The S2 is a large-format camera designed for the professional-photography market, with a 37.5-megapixel CCD that captures a image of 30 x 45 millimeters (56 percent larger than the 24 x 36 millimeters of a 35mm frame). Its $22,000 starting price tag will keep the S2 out of your local Best Buy.

Ralph Hagenauer, Leica’s head of product communications, looks at the Leica family-tree display, in the headquarters lobby.

Leica’s executives often invoke the company’s long history, portraying the latest products as the heirs to over a century of research and development, starting with the monumentally titled Ur-Leica. Invented by Leica engineer Oscar Barnack in 1913, the Ur-Leica was the world’s first 35-millimeter camera (it did not enter mass production until the 1920s). In later years, Leica produced other major innovations, including autofocus, though the technology was sold to Minolta early on.

Like other longtime M-series users, Marshall describes the rangefinder controls as “second nature,” adding, “It’s something that’s a part of me, I’m a part of it.”

Kim Komenich, a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist says the rangefinder is “faster than autofocus…. I could be within a pretty short tolerance of having it be in focus by the time I had it to my eye.”

This symbiotic relationship with the user is perhaps as important to Leica’s success as its inconspicuousness: After mastering the camera, many report that it seems to vanish, leaving the photographer free to simply look.

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Above: They may look like giant cough drops, but these are pucks of raw glass destined to be ground and polished into elements for the Leica 21mm f/1.4 lens. Leica buys its glass from major glass manufacturers around the world, depending on optical purity, availability and price.

Much of the manufacturing equipment in the Solms factory is custom-built to Leica’s specifications, and often uses proprietary processes that the company keeps closely guarded.

But getting there isn’t easy. Marshall and others describe the rangefinder system as daunting to novice photographers — and so is the price tag. The M8, the first digital member of the M family, was released in 2006. The asking price — $4,800, without a lens — was enough to make it a major investment for any photographer.

Despite its hefty MSRP, the M8 lacked a “full-frame” sensor capable of capturing a complete 35-millimeter image, spurring even Leica lifers to reconsider. “It’s a hell of a buy-in now,” says Komenich, who recently sold his Leicas. “They lost a lot of guys like me with the smaller sensors.”

The introduction of the M8 was marred by technical glitches, including oversensitivity to infrared light that made the black parts of an image appear purple. Many users said the M8’s shutter was too loud — a big disappointment to those who had long prized the camera’s quiet and unobtrusive operation. Leica moved quickly to provide additional filters to M8 owners dissatisfied with the purples in their darker images, but it took until 2008 for the company to address some of the camera’s other limitations.

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Above: A puck of raw glass, which will eventually be an element of the Leica 21mm f/1.4 lens, is ground in a computer-controlled grinding machine.

A technician monitors a row of polishing machines during the lens-production process.

Leica lenses are polished to a tolerance of around 1/2,000th of a millimeter, about a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

Leica has historically waited years between releasing successive M-series cameras, but in the digital age, the rest of the market is changing much more quickly. Komenich pointed out that, for working photographers, keeping up is key: News “agencies have minimum standards for image size,” and due to its smaller sensor, “the M8 would have been unattractive to agency photographers, because it didn’t have enough megapixels. Some of the other cameras would fit right in, right off the shelf.”

The Leica M8.2, which hit stores in September 2008, offered a quieter shutter and a fully automatic mode.

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Above: Rows of glass have been through preliminary grinding and polishing phases of the lens-productions process. Inspection will determine whether they will get to the next stage of becoming a Leica lens.

The computer pictured above displays a graphical representation of the way light is transmitted through a lens. The technician can manipulate the lens to check the light transmission from every angle and determine whether a part of the surface requires additional polishing.

With the release of the M9, Leica has tried to remedy some problems and win back some of the professional market. The 18-megapixel, full-frame sensor puts the camera within the current news-agency standards — though at a sticker price of $7,000 before the lens, Leica is still banking on its mystique and legendary craftsmanship to lure customers.

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Above: Leica lenses are covered with as many as 43 non-glass coatings, depending on the model. The lenses are placed in an oven where the coating material is aerosolized and then baked onto the glass using a proprietary process. Each layer is designed to improve the quality of the images the lens produces, correcting color distortions and other inaccuracies.

Despite Leica’s best efforts to source only the purest glass, there are no flawless materials. According to Leica’s Erhardt, “Every lens, every piece of glass, is unique, we just need to make sure that the end result has always the same quality level.”

“I would love to come back,” says Komenich, but “it’s more of a business decision now than it was 20 years ago. Then it was more of a camera, now it’s more of a computer. There’s a much shorter shelf life for digital cameras.”

Though he is cautiously optimistic about the M9, Komenich admits that it all comes down to the specs: “What digital’s done is made it harder to be sentimental about a camera.” Whether the handmade Leicas that have inspired fan clubs, historical societies and countless historic photographs can survive in photography’s cutthroat climate is now anyone’s guess.

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Above: Finshed lens heads are destined for the Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95 ASPH, which the company claims to be the fastest aspherical lens in the world. Priced at $11,000 per lens, this tray represents more than $100,000 of prime Leica glass.

In one of the final stages of quality control, a technician projects a uniform pattern through the lens onto the wall. He then makes a visual inspection of the pattern to insure that the image is sufficiently sharp. It is rumored that if you let your eyes relax and look “through” the pattern, you will see a sailboat.